Nostr report

---

What’s happening in the Nostr ecosystem (while playing with R programming)

Author: manuelgg

Date: December 31, 2024

Introduction

What’s Nostr? Acronym for “Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays”, it’s a relatively new, simple and open protocol that enables global, decentralized, and censorship-resistant communication.

Structured around event objects (plain JSON) and using standard elliptic-curve cryptography for keys and signing (verifiability), it doesn’t rely on a small number of trusted servers for moving or storing data; it assumes that relays (servers) will disappear and allows users to connect and publish to an arbitrary number of relays that they can change over time (resilience).

Alongside this, we have specific clients or apps that validate signatures, while fetching and publishing data from relays of their choice (or the user’s choice). Different client design and purpose (based on what kind of events receive and transmit) makes Nostr a scenario where multiple use cases can be tested, not only for social media but also for identity verification, data storage and sharing, writing wikis or blogs, streaming applications, etc.

💡 We must keep in mind that Nostr is just a very loose set of servers with basically no connection between them, there are no guarantees of anything, and the process of keeping connected to others and finding content must be addressed through many different hackish attempts. To write Nostr applications and to use Nostr one must embrace the inherent chaos. - fiatjaf

Tables

The first big use case for Nostr has been the development of Twitter-like clients, such as Amethyst or Primal. We can take a glimpse of what notes and users are trending in the following tables:

viewof table_columns = Inputs.checkbox(
  column_names,
  {
    value: [column_names[0], column_names[1]],
    label: "Table columns:",
  }
)

⚠️ Data might be outdated until curl package is available for WebR

If you wanna explore the whole content related to an id (for either a note or a profile), paste the ID in Njump

Resources

Protocol:

• https://fiatjaf.com/nostr.html/
• https://github.com/nostr-protocol/
• https://nostr.com/

Data:

• https://nostr.band/
• https://nostr.watch/
• https://nostr.info/